Marlon James: A Brief History of Seven Killings

So there was this hot white hitman from Chicago. His friend invited him to Miami to chill for a few days, but in those few days, he screwed up a nightclub hit set up by the Colombians, and, faced with the choice of being fed to alligators or taking on a job despite early retirement, he agrees to carry out a hit. The target was a Jamaican drug dealer in South Florida. A big one. Born in the 60s, reborn a Kingston rudeboy in the 70s; by the mid 80s, he almost single-handedly got the US east coast and midwest hooked on crack. The hitman had one instruction: before shooting him in the head, whisper: “Jah live.”

That’s how it began, what was supposed to be my shortest novel. I was reading crime fiction again, and was entranced by the idea of writing a short crime novel, something like Jim Thompson’s The Grifters, or anything by Elmore Leonard. I even had a name for it, Look What Love Is Doing to Me, a riff on Chris Whitley’s “Look What Love Has Done”. Love, because the hitman was gay and hopelessly in love with a boy who didn’t love him back. The Jamaican was almost an afterthought: one of the men who tried to kill Bob Marley, who was now getting his comeuppance. I saw the whole story wrapping up in about 230 pages. The book ended up being 700 pages, and the hitman doesn’t even appear until page 458.

Why? The easy answer would be that Marley is a man of such explosive charisma that even in death he has the ability to take over any space he’s in, even a novel. Maybe this comes from reading so much crime, but as writer, I feel what motivates me the most is a mystery to solve. I never write what I know. I write because I don’t have a clue. And the Marley assassination attempt is the big three–dot ellipsis of 1976: a huge event that trails off into secrets and murmurs, something that nobody ever wanted to talk about.

But the hot gay hitman and me turned cold when I ran out of story. This is not a new thing for a writer; in fact, it happens to me all the time. A constant trying on of characters for size, and writing them into dead ends before I stumble on whoever is going to take me through the whole novel. Lilith, from my previous novel, The Book of Night Women, came out of a conversation two former slaves were having in a bar about a fugitive they both knew. She was supposed to show up for a few pages to give witness testimony, but took over the whole book. So I tried another character, a 15-year-old gunman called Bambam, someone who I had written before. Bambam was raised in a violent, desolate Kingston slum, and saw his parents murdered before he was 12. He murdered another kid near his age for his underwear. He also had a deep fixation on Marley verging on the homoerotic. I didn’t get further than 60 pages. I was convinced that this was just another tremor, and the quake was coming.

But by the end of 2010, I had a series of failed novellas and no story. That one character, who would survive the first 60 pages of writing (always my test of whether I have a novel or not) never showed up. Even though Marley ended up in every story, I knew he wasn’t whom I wanted to write about. I did what writers do: poured out my sorrows over drinks with my good friend, Rachel, a director and playwright who was working on a novel of her own. “I don’t know whose story it is!” I said. She looked at me with that “already over your BS” look, which was classic Rachel and said, “Why do you think it’s one person’s story? When last have you read As I Lay Dying?”

That was the first time I realised I had a novel all along. It never occurred to me that it could be a multi-person narrative, despite my immense love for the form. Freed from the burden of carrying an entire novel, my characters could simply be themselves. Funnily enough, it wasn’t until then that I realised that Marley was the theme holding them together. Usually one gets the big idea, which then branches out in all sorts of directions. I was doing the reverse without even knowing it. Writing from the fringes, moving in ever closer to the big event, until it became the centre of the novel.

Marlon James was born in Jamaica and now lives in Minneapolis. A Brief History of Seven Killings is his third novel.

•A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James (Oneworld Publications, £8.99). To order a copy for £6.99, go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min. p&p of £1.99.

Tom McCarthy: Satin Island

The initial spark of Satin Island came to me, as it does to the book’s narrator, in a dream. I saw a great imperial harbour – maybe New York, maybe London, maybe ancient Alexandria or Byzantium, or more precisely all of these rolled into one – with the water’s troughs and ridges glinting in the sun, though it was night. And in the middle of the harbour there was a protuberance, a giant mound full of smouldering rubbish. The pile was glowing from the inside, throwing out these deep, rich flashes: it was a kind of Gerard Manley Hopkins dream, with shining from shook foil and blue-bleak embers gashing gold vermilion, that kind of imagery. I woke myself up saying, “Satin Island,” and knew immediately that that would be the next book’s title.

But there was nothing else at this point. A few months later I was on an artist residency in Stockholm, in a big white studio, and I projected lots of images of oil spills onto the walls. The novel I’d just finished writing, C, ends with black matter slipping off a boat into an ocean, so I sort of reprised that. Ever since seeing Cristo wrap those islands in pink skirts, I’d been thinking: “Doesn’t an oil spill do that already?” When you look at MPEGs of oil moving through water, coating rocks and animals and so on – when you really pay attention to them, at a formal level – it’s kind of hypnotic. Oil is dinosaurs and rocks and trees from millions of years ago; so an oil spill is Earth’s history, its archive, returning, like Freud’s repressed, but at a level of pure minerality. And I kept seeing a parallel between all this black matter spattering a snowy coastline and ink staining white paper, so the whole thing turned into an allegory for the act of writing.

Bizarrely, after a few weeks of looking at these images, transcribing them on to my laptop, the big Louisiana oil spill happened, so it all became quite topical. But that’s the point with oil spills: there’s always one happening, or just happened, or about to happen. Like the car crash for Ballard: an ongoing catastrophe with neither origin nor end. That kind of temporality is interesting: a perpetual traumatic present in which other periods circulate, polluting one another. I also projected Guy Debord films. The S.I. of Satin Island could maybe stand for Situationist International as well. Debord’s thinking around spectacle and power is deeply relevant to now, but limited, too. He held to these naive fetishes around purity and authenticity: everyone else is co-opted or recuperated, but I’m not: I’m pure. Which is bollocks: thinking – and writing – has to begin with an appreciation of radical inauthenticity, of being always and irremediably caught within the mesh – of language, power, capital, the Symbolic Order. That’s why I made Satin Island’s hero a corporate anthropologist. He doesn’t hover above the world like an angel, or sit apart in a romantic garret; he works for the system, for the Man – even if he harbours fantasies, like Dostoevsky’s “underground” clerk, of bringing the whole complex crashing down. My guy works for a cutting-edge consultancy, bringing ethnographic insight to bear on civic and consumer contexts, and his company are themselves advising on a huge infrastructural project that will define our era, but that no one really understands, so giant and complex is it. I wanted to keep the novel’s central, overarching backbone vague – in the same way as you never find out exactly what Josef K is accused of, just that he is accused, and that’s the structure of The Trial.

Kafka is huge for me: the great writer of systems, infrastructure and bureaucracy. While I was finishing the manuscript of Satin Island all the Edward Snowden stuff was blowing up, and I thought: “This is kind of what it’s about” – although, of course, it isn’t directly. But even more central than Kafka to me was Mallarmé, and in particular his monomaniacal notion of the book-to-come, the giant tome to which everything would belong, whose bringing-into-being or “writing” requires a total remodelling of the very structure of the book itself. It seems to perfectly anticipate digital culture, the way everything, all our kinship-networks, belief systems and so on are mapped and notated every time we go on Amazon or Facebook. But it’s happening in a way that makes the figure of the writer, not to mention the credo of unexamined realism to which middlebrow fiction clings, increasingly redundant or unworkable. It even makes the act of reading virtually unthinkable: the “book” exists, it’s writing itself all the time – but who can read it?

With Satin Island, I wanted to write from that place of confusion and impossibility – not just about it but somehow from it, too. Because, as far as I can see, that’s where we’re at.

•Tom McCarthy is a writer and artist. His novel C was shortlisted for the Man Booker in 2010.

Chigozie Obioma: The Fishermen

In 2009, I was away from Nigeria, in Cyprus, and I was homesick. I had a call from my dad one day, and during the conversation he mentioned my two oldest brothers who used to have a sibling rivalry growing up that would sometimes spiral into violence. My dad mentioned that they were so close now, in their early 30s. After the conversation, I started to reflect on what was the worst that could have happened during those days when they would beat each other up. Also, around that time I was reading a book by Will Durant titled The Story of Civilisation, in which he stresses that a civilisation cannot be destroyed from the outside, but from within. The idea of writing a story about a close-knit family came up, and then I wanted to explore the idea of an external force that would come from the outside and destroy a united family.

On a secondary level, the novel is a commentary on the idea of Nigeria as a nation. The country is a construct of the British, and it is a contraption that is not sustainable. Nigeria is a montage of different nations. The Igbo nation, for example, is about 40 million people, and that’s just one tribal region. Thriving nation-states, with their own identities, were merged together. So, just as the nation-states yielded to the force of this external power, the boys yield to the external authority of the madman whose prophecy alters the dynamics of their family.

The structure of the novel was born out of two philosophical ideas: first, that children mostly remember things by association with whatever they are fascinated about. A child bullied at school might come home and narrate a tale about a boy “as strong as a lion” beating him up. And once you represent, say, the death of the brother by an association with a sparrow, it makes the impact of the death less tragic. Secondly, I wanted Ben to believe in the idea of a parallel universe – in the sense that there is an interdependency of creatures and other living things – and that the story of a human can be told from the perspective of a tree, the story of a country through a wormhole, or the story of a woman through a bird. This led me to create two narrators who are one in order to represent the nature of remembering. Hence, the story is linear, but not necessarily chronological. The story ends, and picks up again, and begins – even when it ends – from its beginning. I wanted to create a point of view in which the older Benjamin recounts the events of his childhood by going back to the court where he’d first told the story about his brothers and himself. Hence, I have two narrators telling the same story at the same time.

The plot of the novel is centred around the Igbo ideas of destiny. What happens in the life of a person? Are we in control of what happens to us? We are a very superstitious people, and in the Igbo imagination, there are no coincidences. Everything is preordained. Hence, we live a life that is mixed with myths, and force penetrates our lives every hour. A man may try to lift himself up by hard work, but that same hard work might be what kills him in the end. The tragic flaw is a central concept in classic Greek and Shakespearian tragedies.

• Chigozie Obioma was born in Nigeria and now lives in the United States, where he is professor of literature and creative writing at the University of Nabraska-Lincoln. The Fisherman is his first novel.

Sunjeev Sahota: The Year of the Runaways

In 2004, in India, I met a man who’d recently returned from 12 years living and working illegally in England. He was tall, middle-aged, with a sparse beard. He liked a whisky. In England, he’d lived mainly in Leicester and, as the motorway signposts have it, the North. I was based in Leeds at the time and he said he’d worked there, too, widening a section of the M1, but he’d spent the winter sleeping on a cemetery bench and had left the city soon after.

He lived in the next village along from my own family and over the following six years, whenever I returned to India, he’d send word for me to join him in a whisky. The next day I’d make the half-hour walk up the sandy track that ran behind my uncle’s farm. We got on: I like listening to people’s stories and he had the happy drinker’s gift for telling them well. On one visit, I asked him why he’d first left India, and he led me out of the solid stone house to his former home, a much smaller shack in a muddy field by the gurdwara, a Sikh temple. His younger brother had died, he explained, leaving behind a wife and five children that he’d have to now support. He sold what land he had, borrowed what he could, sent the women and children to live with his in-laws, and stole his way across Asia and into Europe. He took a massive chance, essentially, which for him paid off: there was plenty of work in England at that time, even if the pay was poor, and he eventually earned enough to build a bigger house, buy the land back, and settle his daughters’ and nieces’ wedding dowries.

He died in 2010, and when I visited his widow later that year to offer my condolences, she told me two things that surprised and moved me. First, and unbeknownst to them all, she’d been pregnant with their youngest daughter when he’d left one night in a truck bound for Europe. Their daughter was six months old by the time he was made aware of her existence and, of course, 12 when he first laid eyes on her. Second, the doctors had told him at least three months before his death that he hadn’t very long to live and was unlikely to see out the year. He didn’t tell this to anyone, not even his wife, and instead went about quietly, discreetly, putting his affairs in order.

But it would be wrong to say that this story, or any of the countless similar stories I’ve heard in the last 15 or so years, was the story behind my book – or, at least, the only story behind it. We could go back further, to an adolescence in the north of England, the manufacturing industry on its knees, the local labour squeezed out of work; back once more to the first major migration of Indians in the 1960s, naturalised citizens who now happily take advantage of the new migrant labour; to the hash that was made of Partition, an act that in time forced many displaced Indians, my grandparents and father included, to seek out that better life abroad; to Gandhi and satyagraha; to Dr BR Ambedkar and his battle with the Mahatma over the rights of untouchables; to a British Raj, and the Mughals before them, who reinvigorated and exploited caste differences for their own ends; to Buddha, to the Vedics, all the way back to the Time of Manu until, as ever, we begin with a flood, always a flood.

Courage, along with hopefulness, is any migrant’s perpetual state, and it was this courage to find a way through life that I wanted to dignify and explore in my protagonists.

• Sunjeev Sahota was born in Derbyshire. The Year of the Runaways is his second novel.

• The Year of the Runaways by Sunjeev Sahota (Picador, £14.99). To order a copy for £11.99, go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min. p&p of £1.99.

Anne Tyler: A Spool of Blue Thread

First I’ll have to think up a family, because I’ve decided that this book should be a family saga.

Let’s begin with the mother. I want her to be likable, so I’ll make her kindhearted and easygoing, with not-too-neat hair and an amiable disregard for weight issues. And “kindhearted” makes me think that social work would be a good profession for her. Then since she needs a flaw or two, I’ll give her a social worker-type flaw: she takes a little too much pleasure in feeling sorry for people.

The father will be a builder. I know this because my novel is going to be set mostly within a single house, and it’s all the better if the family itself built that house. The father has that logical, slightly too-concrete builder mind, and that masculine fondness for constantly assessing the physical details around him. (I remind myself how my father and my three brothers used to love to point out various defects in my house when they visited me. “Just thought you’d like to know,” one might say, “that window shade in your guestroom’s coming loose. Got a Phillips screwdriver handy?”)

The children: there will be the Difficult One, because that’s always good for plot developments. And when there’s a Difficult One there is bound to be an Extra-Good One; the two depend on each other. Those two are boys. Then two girls for balance – a hard-edged one and a softie. Let the softie be a builder, too. I like it when women take on supposedly masculine occupations.

Okay, I have my characters. But I don’t really have them. They’re like so many paper dolls, with their single-trait personalities. When I move on to construct a plot outline, I assign them various actions almost at random. This one should elope. These two should quarrel. That one gets hit by a car.

But I plough ahead, anyway. I start writing the first chapter: I make the parents engage in a conversation. The nice thing about conversations is how one line leads to another; the possibilities expand of their own accord. This conversation begins with an argument about a telephone call the parents have just received from the difficult child, but in the course of the argument other facts begin to emerge on their own – the difficult child’s previous difficulties, and then the particular minor irritations that chafe this particular married couple, as well as the whole history of their general family dynamics. I’m getting to know these people, a little.

Still, with each new scene I have an uncomfortable sense of making it up, of ordering them about willy-nilly. Oh, what a silly, artificial business novel-writing is, I’ll think. Who am I kidding, here? And I glance at the John Updike poem that I keep above my desk, “Marching Through a Novel” where he likens his characters to meek foot soldiers blindly following his orders. Poor dears. I pity them.

But gradually, new layers develop. I did plan for Denny to marry but I didn’t know exactly whom he married, and once I see her, I smile. I’m intrigued by Stem’s wife Nora: she’s as mysterious to me as she is to the rest of the family, and I perk up whenever she enters a scene.

Then I find out that the mother of the family used to have one of those bad-boy boyfriends when she was in her teens. Why, I had no idea! I have to go back to an earlier section to drop in a couple of references to him. (Or, as John Updike put it, to “develop a motive backwards to suit the deed that’s done”.) This is why I love rewriting: each new draft reflects more of those extra layers that I hadn’t foreseen at the start.

And Junior, the family patriarch: when he arrives, it actually makes my heart beat faster to see him, after all his descendants’ conjectures about him. And his wife turns out to be not at all who I had thought she was; much more is going on in that marriage than I had ever imagined when I was writing my one-page outline. I’m so surprised that I laugh out loud.

So here they are, finally – big as life and very determined, shouldering past me without a glance in order to get where they’re set on going.

Hello, Whitshanks! Welcome, and goodbye.

•Anne Tyler is the author of 20 novels. Her first, If Morning Ever Comes, was published in 1964. Breathing Lessons won the Pulitzer prize in 1989 and her work has been adapted for film.

Hanya Yanagihara: A Little Life

For a while, we moved every two years: Los Angeles to Honolulu to New York to Baltimore to Orange County, California (then a vast tan stretch of desert, its landscape denuded of the palm trees that had been removed to make room for housing developments) to Honolulu to a small town in northeast Texas called Tyler. Elsewhere, there was extended family – my parents’ siblings, some cousins – but we rarely saw them, both by choice and by circumstance. So it was just the four of us: me, my mother and father, my younger brother.

There were also my father’s friends. He was never someone who craved having people around him, who found delight in human company – not like my mother – but in every place, he made a friend, and those friends, as much as the houses and apartments we lived in, distinguished our time in each new city, each new town. They were alike in many ways, these friends: all men, all single, almost always childless, all casually brilliant, and all, somehow, untethered from the material needs and rules of the world that my father had chosen to live in, the one of mortgages and tuitions and being a husband – and parenthood. They would come have dinner with us and talk about what they were reading, the far-away places they had studied or travelled. With my brother and me, they were kind and ironic and a little distant – sometimes bemused by our existence, but indulgent as well. Many of them were research doctors, like my father was, and after eating they would sit on the porch or the yard or the patio and smoke cigars or pipes and talk about papers they were writing or reading. They seemed to glide through life, these men: the forces that nudged others towards marriage, towards the pursuit of money, seemed to have no power over them. I was fascinated by them, and by who my father became around them: someone for whom children and a wife were an abstraction; a person unto himself. We were my father’s responsibility, but they were his joys. When I was an adolescent, I became convinced my father was having an affair – he, who was so punctual, began coming home from work later and later, silent and exhausted, and it wasn’t until many years after that I learned that he had spent those months of nights visiting his friend R., who had been committed to a mental hospital, sitting beside him as he wove plastic lanyards.

A friend is the first person we choose for no other reason but companionship, for the pleasure of being in his company (of course, we choose friends for darker, more complicated reasons as well: for how they reflect our own contorted ideas of ourselves, for how we hope they might correct our deficiencies). However much we might love or appreciate our children, our parents, our families, our spouses or lovers or partners, we remain with them, often, from a certain measure of obligation, be it sexual, legal or moral. But choosing a friend is more often than not an assertion of self, an expression of agency: your choice announces not just to the world, but to yourself, who you are, what you crave, what you admire. And every day you remain with your friend is another day you make that same choice. The relationship is elemental not because it can be codified, but because it can’t. Yet it’s also, so often – at least in modern times – considered something of a secondary relationship, a practice run on the road to the more serious and meaningful bonds of parenthood and spousedom. I thought often of our tendency to reduce friendship to something smaller and less significant than it naturally is while I was writing my novel A Little Life, which is, in large part, about the primacy of friendships, about their inability to heal but their ability to make our lives gloriously unknowable and complex.

I am now 41, and I live in New York. I have no long-term partner; I have no children. I do have friends, and they are contradictory and challenging and occasionally annoying: I love them. Often, I adore them. When my father was 41, we were living in that small town in Texas. Sometimes, after he’d come home late from visiting R., he’d sit at the kitchen table and crack pistachios. I remember those nights still: the buggy, humid air, the cat at my feet flicking the tip of his tail against my legs, my father’s quiet. I was 12, and didn’t know how to have the conversation I could’ve had with him, though it’s one I know I could have now: what are you thinking about? I would’ve asked. Someone I love, he would have said. And in the shortness of his answer: two lives. A life.

• Hanya Yanagihara is an American author and deputy editor of T, the New York Times magazine.